This bothered me on Wednesday, and it bothered me all through my vacation, and I’m surprised it hasn’t been more of a public issue reflecting that it bothered more people than just me. But of all the incredibly stupid, sordid, arrogant things to emerge from this muddy Rick Pitino, um, affair, this quote irritated me worst of all:

“When 9/11 hit, you needed a community to get you over it. In New York City, it was easy because everybody knew the devastation of that and they got each other over it. In Louisville, the impact wasn’t felt like New York City, but I needed this community to help me get over it.”

In New York City, it was easy? Are you kidding me?

Look, even if you want to give Pitino every benefit of every doubt on this one, read that statement in the brightest possible light, don’t you have to wonder about a man who, a day after it’s revealed he was cheating on his wife, lying to his family, financed an out-of-wedlock abortion and was thus exposed as one of the biggest hypocrites in history, actually references 9/11, even in an explanatory way?

What kind of sociopath does that?

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ON the day after David Wright made it a full-house of Mets core players on the DL, I think it’s worthwhile to point out — to those who wonder if the Mets had enough to stand toe-to-toe with the other contenders in the N.L. East — that they played 25 games in which Wright, Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran and Carlos Delgado were in the lineup together. They were 15-10 in those games. That’s about 97-65 over 162 games, and it wasn’t as if those 25 games made anyone rush to compare them to the ’86 Mets, either. Just a thought.

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And one other thought, not that I like to bring rain to a sunny day: before you start getting too euphoric about waking up on a day when the Red Sox are a half-game out of the playoff picture … take a day to think about that army of Texas Rangers taking aim at Yankee Stadium’s pop-gun fences in October. That is all.